Tricky Times Ahead

So we are in lockdown now and most of you are wondering how do you cope staying at home, not being able to go out... welcome to our world, we lockdown when we are in the middle of nowhere and our towpath garden is our surroundings. We can honestly say we never get bored on the boat, there is always something to do. Yes the brasses help, polishing helps, and general maintenance also helps, but we are even good at sitting doing nothing!.. We know our views are pretty amazing sometimes, but during the winter months it can get gutty, but we never get bored.. This is the time folks to do those jobs you never have time to do, and just enjoy some quality time.
We have to say it has been very quiet on the towpaths and on the canals so people are abiding by the rules which as Boris says is helping our NHS.. Not only is it helping our health service it is helping the suppliers to the NHS. Masks, robes, respirators, goggles, gloves, and medication etc.. All these people are keeping us alive at this moment in time.. Come on Great Britain we can all do this..

Some of you have been asking how we have got on with the lithium batteries and solar and you all know this year we were on shoreline for the best part of the winter.. The batteries seemed to cope with this and they haven't been affected by being on float for most of the time..
Now we are back on the cut we realise again just how good they are, and maybe being static for three months off shoreline will be another test for them.. For the first four days we have had good weather and the solar charges the batteries during the day to give us 100% by the evening. We normally get about 20 - 25 Amps going in on a good day and 10 Amps on a cloudy day.. this is a good day..

In this graph you can see it was also a good day, and the two red spikes are Al using the washing machine, and you can see how easy the batteries recovered..

So we haven't had to run our engine yet and we have been using the immersion heater in the calorifier, and also sometimes running the central heating for an hour in the morning. We are now full of diesel so lets see how far that goes. We used to have to fill up once a month, even if we were static somewhere, or cruising.. All this has made things so stress free in these difficult times ahead, lets hope we all get through it..